Where's all that snow?

Posted Friday, July 8, 2011, at 8:14 AM

It wasn't that long ago that many people were wishing for all of the snow to be gone and swimming weather to be here. I wasn't one of them, mind you, I like snow and cold weather, but even I got tired of the cold weather this past year. It just seemed to hang on forever as though it were in a hand to hand fight with the warm weather. Soon after the big snow of last year there a lot of people who wanted to see the warm weather many of us are cussing right now.

I am one of the complainers when it gets this hot. I just don't like this blazing heat. I understand the change of the seasons, but does it have to be so drastic? Other than a few years here and there, I have lived my entire life in Missouri and I like it here.

I do not like the summer heat, but I wouldn't want to live in place where its sunny and 70 every day either. There is something to be said for the power and beauty of thunderheads boiling thousands of feet up into the summer sky and unleashing a torrent of rain on a parched landscape.

There is also something to be said about the changing fall colors that so many of us drive around just to take a look at. I love that time of year. Its warm; not blistering hot but tolerable, and the thirst of the land has been quenched by some of the September rains that don't really pose the same threats as the violent storms of the spring and summer. It's also the time of harvest and all the land and its flora and fauna is at its peak of abundance.

Then the days grow noticeably shorter and winter begins to creep into the region. It seems like it's here before you know it. It locks onto the land like a youngster's tongue to a frozen metal pole; it gets colder and colder, the wind shrieks out of the north and then, eventually, it snows.

It doesn't usually snow like it did last winter, but I don't mind the snow, even when it's like that. How often do we get to see something like that. I can't remember more than three or four snows like that in my lifetime. Each occasion was momentous to me, but give me a day when the mercury spikes up to 115, something I have never seen, and I would just as soon forget it.

I guess I'll just have to live with this blast furnace heat for a couple of months more. I don't have to like it, but I can't change it, and if I want to enjoy the rest of the seasons, I can't leave. I guess what I've been trying to get at with all of this is where is all that snow when you really need it?